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Solidarity-U.S. deeply mourns the death of Marielle Franco (27 July 1979 – 14 March 2018), assassinated in a targeted drive-by shooting in Rio de Janeiro. A Brazilian bisexual, feminist, sociologist and political and human rights activist, Marielle was an elected councilwoman and prominent member of PSOL, the Party of Socialism and Liberation. For her tireless work against police brutality, she was beloved in the favelas and hated by the repressive abusers. Her murder has brought a mass outpouring of grief and rage in Brazil and internationally.

Single-Payer Health Care bill HR-676 covers 100% of everything with the least taxpayer money! What will it take to pass it? And why is neither S-1804 (see below), nor a “state-by-state” approach, the answer to the health-care crisis?

President Truman proposed universal health care for the United States in 1945, and health care for everyone, covering every medical necessity and costing less than we now pay, has always been the goal of the single-payer movement. So why is it that 73 years later, we still don’t have it?

The short answer is that we keep being suckered into believing that we must settle for a compromise with the for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the only entities that will not greatly benefit from its passage. (Ironically, their own employees would benefit from having 100% comprehensive portable coverage, and HR-676 will fund their retraining and pay them generous unemployment until they are re-employed.)

Many universal single-payer health care advocates have been led to believe that the only way to achieve our goal is via an incremental approach. The two most popular forms of this approach are state-by-state single payer, and surprisingly (at least in its current form) Senator Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” plan S-1804.

While desirable for some things, unfortunately, in the case of sweeping changes such as universal health care, an incremental approach is a blind alley that will delay our success — likely by decades...

Long view of Clarion Alley with various murals by CAMP. Photo by Dawn Starin.

SOME WALLS KEEP us out. Some walls keep us apart. Not these walls. Clarion Alley's walls of art invite us in. Creating a dialogue, they shout in both full glorious Technicolor and in stark shades of black and white,"Come in and look at our history, read our words, come in and appreciate what we must always remember, what we have lost, what we have found, what we must stand for and what we must treasure."....

Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born director of Lumumba (2000) and I Am Not Your Negro (2016), has a new film. The Young Karl Marx, a period drama, recounts the life of the founder of communism between his exile from Germany in 1843 and the publication of The Communist Manifesto on the eve of the revolutions of 1848.

Justly described as a bromance by some reviewers, the film’s central story-line is the blossoming friendship of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But Peck doesn’t overly romanticize these figures. On the contrary, he depicts them with human weaknesses and desires. More importantly, Peck shows us Marx and Engels as inter-organizational activists, at a time when the socialist left was nascent and disorganized, but poverty and injustice were pushing people towards a breaking point. We also see that, even before the The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels’ writing grew directly out of their efforts to organize the political and economic power of workers.

Marx and Engels spar with Proudhonists, exposing their failure to account for the growing divide between bosses and workers, but then team up with the Proudhonists against the German idealists; for, though pulling no punches in their critique of Proudhon, Marx and Engels were prepared to acknowledge the Proudhonists’ successes in building a base among French workers. Basically, Peck depicts Marx and Engels as upstarts with a purpose...

Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born director of Lumumba (2000) and I Am Not Your Negro (2016), has a new film. The Young Karl Marx, a period drama, recounts the life of the founder of communism between his...

How does ecosocialist politics differ from traditional socialist and labor politics? How do we ensure the generalized satisfaction of needs for all, including the equalization of living standards between the industrialized nations and the rest of the world, if humanity can no longer afford to keep expanding production based on energy from fossil fuels?

In 2014 Solidarity’s Ecosocialist Working Group began a project to discuss these and related questions. We publish three essays here as the beginning of a working paper exchanging ideas, proposals, and possible strategic frameworks. We also invite your comments.